Without knowing what hardware you've got available in the laptop it's impossible to answer this question definitively. If the laptop has an Ethernet port (most do, these days) then you can simply get an Ethernet card for the desktop PC and wire them together with a crossover cable--this is the fastest and best way of going about it.

If the laptop DOESN'T have Ethernet you'll probably be forced back to using a Direct Cable Connection. You don't need any third party software to do this--it's all built into Windows, although you may need to Add/Remove Windows Components to get it installed--but you WILL need an appropriate cable to connect either the parallel or serial ports on the two machines together. Using either is going to be slow, though.

In this article, I am going to show you how to simulate a multi-site Lab environment on a single Hyper-V host. I use this method successfully in my own lab to simulate three fully routed global AD Sites on a Windows 10 Hyper-V host.

This video gives you a great overview about bandwidth monitoring with SNMP and WMI with our network monitoring solution PRTG Network Monitor (https://www.paessler.com/prtg).
If you're looking for how to monitor bandwidth using netflow or packet s…

NetCrunch network monitor is a highly extensive platform for network monitoring and alert generation. In this video you'll see a live demo of NetCrunch with most notable features explained in a walk-through manner. You'll also get to know the philos…